Andrei Tarkovsky: Mostly towards the protagonist, towards the Stalker. In a certain sense I am convinced that there is something within me that connects me to him. I would like to help him in some way, to defend him. Let's say that for me he is like a brother. A lost brother, perhaps, but a brother nevertheless. In any case, I feel, in a heart-rending manner, his moments of conflict with the world that so easily wounds him. I feel that his psychological make-up, his approach and reaction to reality, are similar to my own. So much so that, despite being an outlaw, he is much more cultured, educated, and intelligent, in the film, than the writer or the scientist, who nevertheless, as characters, express the very idea of intelligence, science, education. From the very beginning I had the urge to make a bookshelf stuffed full of books appear, suddenly, in the film. And it appears in the film's finale, in a scenography that is entirely inappropriate for such an object. I would like to have such a bookshelf in my home. I've never had such a bookshelf. And I would like to have it in the same disorder in which the Stalker keeps his.
